Spengler was quite conscious of this clash of orientations in the West. He knew that men are generally disdainful of experience and that, driven by limitless and uncontrolled hope, they like to conceptualize the future in terms of what they consider the desirable rather than the likely course of events. In counterpoint to these, in his view, irrational trends, he remarked that optimism is naive and in some respects even vulgar, and that it surely stands for cowardice when one is afraid to face the fact that life is fleeting and transient in all its aspects.
These thoughts touch a major motif in Spengler's philosophy which critics tend to ignore, namely the recognition of the place of tragedy in the Occidental cultural world. Tragic modes of experiencing life can only evolve there, where the individual human being is presumed autonomous in his feelings, thoughts, and actions, and where he is therefore vulnerable to the agony of having to make choices between conflicting interests and commitments. They are thus absent in the high cultures of the Orient, where human beings are generally subsumed in the superior concept of the consensus or in the social roles assigned them. In fact, they have been fully developed only in the cultures of the West, and in this context, again, Spengler suggests that they have been more enduring in continental Europe than in England, where they atrophied under the weight of utilitarianism and pragmatism, and in the United States, where "the longing for the happy ending" came to set the tone for life.
Spengler's pessimism, then, is strictly qualified. And the same holds for his determinism. He notes that there is nothing absolutely inevitable about the passage from one phase in the history of a culture, a nation, or a state to the other, and that none of these three organisms is bound to wither away. Decline will set in only when living human beings choose to play light with their society's moral and legal ground rules and when they voluntarily indulge in the mechanization of their intellectual and sentimental lives. Indices of decline are man-made, after all—hence Spengler's distinction between possible and actual culture. Indeed, there is a strong suggestion in his work that biography is, in the final analysis, dominant over the flux of time. Just as he himself had the courage to fathom the idea of decline without ever suspending efforts to arrest this process, so does he seem to have believed that intelligent men must always be ready to size up the epoch and the milieu in which they find themselves so that they may take constructive action in response to the demands of the hour. Statesmanship in particular, he tells us, is just not conceivable without this dimension of thought.
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Western Idea of Progress
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Thanks to Hierarchicalist for his help
